Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other.

Amazon Route 53 effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS – such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, or Amazon S3 buckets – and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS. You can use Amazon Route 53 to configure DNS health checks to route traffic to healthy endpoints or to independently monitor the health of your application and its endpoints. Amazon Route 53 makes it possible for you to manage traffic globally through a variety of routing types, including Latency Based Routing, Geo DNS, and Weighted Round Robin—all of which can be combined with DNS Failover in order to enable a variety of low-latency, fault-tolerant architectures. Amazon Route 53 also offers Domain Name Registration – you can purchase and manage domain names such as example.com and Amazon Route 53 will automatically configure DNS settings for your domains.

Much like a phone book, the Internet’s DNS system manages mapping between names and numbers. In DNS’s case, the names are domain names (www.example.com) that are easy for your users to remember. Instead of phone numbers, in DNS, these names are mapped to IP addresses (192.0.2.1) that specify the location of computers on the Internet. Amazon Route 53 performs two DNS functions. First, it lets you manage the IP addresses listed for your domain names in the Internet’s DNS phone book. These listings are called DNS “records.” Second, like a directory assistance service, Amazon Route 53 answers requests to translate specific domain names into their corresponding IP addresses. These requests are called “queries.”

Amazon Route 53 is designed to be fast, easy to use, and cost-effective. It answers DNS queries with low latency by using a global network of DNS servers. Queries for your domain are automatically routed to the nearest DNS server, and thus answered with the best possible performance. With Amazon Route 53, you can create and manage your public DNS records with the AWS Management Console or with an easy-to-use API. If you need a domain name, you can find an available name and register it using Amazon Route 53. You can also transfer existing domains into Amazon Route 53’s management. It’s also integrated with other Amazon Web Services. For instance, by using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service with Amazon Route 53, you can control who in your organization can make changes to your DNS records. Like other Amazon Web Services, there are no long-term contracts or minimum usage requirements for using Amazon Route 53 – you pay only for managing domains through the service, for the number of queries that the service answers, and for the domain names that you have registered through Amazon Route 53.

When using Amazon CloudFront to deliver your website content, visitors to your website can now access your site at the zone apex (or "root domain"). For example, your site can be accessed as example.com instead of www.example.com.

Amazon Route 53 is built using AWS’s highly available and reliable infrastructure. The distributed nature of our DNS servers helps ensure a consistent ability to route your end users to your application. Route 53 is designed to provide the level of dependability required by important applications. Amazon Route 53 is backed by the Amazon Route 53 Service Level Agreement.

Amazon Route 53 is designed to work well with other AWS features and offerings. You can use Amazon Route 53 to map domain names to your Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon CloudFront distributions, and other AWS resources. By using the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service with Amazon Route 53, you get fine grained control over who can update your DNS data. You can use Amazon Route 53 to map your zone apex (example.com versus www.example.com) to your Elastic Load Balancing instance, Amazon CloudFront distribution, or Amazon S3 website bucket using a feature called Alias record.

With self-service sign-up, Route 53 can start to answer your DNS queries within minutes. You can configure your DNS settings with the AWS Management Console or our easy-to-use API. You can also programmatically integrate the Route 53 API into your overall web application. For instance, you can use Route 53’s API to create a new DNS record whenever you create a new EC2 instance.

Using a global anycast network of DNS servers around the world, Amazon Route 53 is designed to automatically route your users to the optimal location depending on network conditions. As a result, the service offers low query latency for your end users, as well as low update latency for your DNS record management needs.

Amazon Route 53 passes on the benefits of AWS’s scale to you. You pay only for managing domains through the service and the number of queries that the service answers for each of your domains, at a low cost and without minimum usage commitments or any up-front fees.

By integrating Amazon Route 53 with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), you can grant unique credentials and manage permissions for every user within your AWS account and specify who has access to which parts of the Amazon Route 53 service.

Amazon Route 53 offers Weighted Round-Robin (WRR), also known as DNS load balancing. This lets you assign weights to your DNS records that specify what portion of your traffic is routed to various endpoints.